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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Anne d’Autriche en ses images : légitimation du pouvoir féminin et culture visuelle de la majesté dans la France du XVIIe siècle

subject

description

Anne of Austria offers an important part, yet neglected, in the the development of royal iconography in seventeenth century France. Devoided from management of power under the reign of her husband Louis XIII, she is however the subject of many representations. The number of her images increases when she accedes to the responsibilities of the government at the death of the king, in 1643, becoming regent in the name of her minor son, Louis XIV. Beyond its majority in 1651, she maintains herself at a prominent place, until the death of Mazarin in 1661. During these two decades, a deep political crisis in France culminates in the so-called Fronde. In this context, the image of Anne of Austria becomes the instrument of a visual narrative on monarchical authority and for the defense of the royal power. Crossing a large corpus of representations of the regent with textual sources, this thesis analyzes the visual construction of this narrative, and its effects on the evolution of the image of power in France after the reign of Louis XIII. In contemporary legal and symbolic literature, "majesty" is presented as he essential quality of the sovereign and the mark of his identity. It must then be visually translated in a female incarnation, despite the fundamental laws, in particular the Salic law, which however exclude women from power. The abundance of the images collected for this thesis, nearly five hundred items, offers an essential source to understand how the queen was able to overcome this constraint and contribute, by renewing its models, to the representation of the monarchical authority. This thesis allows us to reconsider the relationship between women and power. To analyze these different issues, the thesis is organized in four parts. The first part attempts to understand the image of the reigning queen, analyzing in a first chapter the legal definition of the queen, to show how the legal order determines the symbolic one. One can thus understand how the marriage of the queen in 1615 and her arrival at the court can be apprehended as an "iconographic birth". The second chapter explores the different features of this portrait of the queen, showing that it is at the same time a revelation of personal characteristics of the queen and a reaction to the queen's political and civil situation. The second part raises the question of the means implemented to operate the transformation of this image, which allows the queen to appear as regent of the kingdom. The third chapter analyzes in particular the chronological stages of this transformation, while the fourth chapter studies, from a practical point of view, the "fabrication" of this image. The third part then considers the content of the images, drawing up a three-step analysis of its iconography. The fifth chapter addresses the body of the queen as a support for the moral dimensions of her portrait. The sixth chapter deepens this question in the religious perspective, studying how the regent manages to produce the image of a queen "très chrétienne". The seventh chapter concludes this iconographic analysis by studying the political dimension of Anne of Austria's image. The fourth and last part gives finally an analysis of the way these images "operate". The eighth chapter shows how the situation of the queen's representations in decor is decisive for their interpretation, considering the cases of the royal residences and the private interiors. Finally, the ninth chapter proposes a study of the performance of images, extending the analysis to the public uses of representations of the queen, in monuments or during ceremonies.